Shadow Slave

Sunny approached the heavily reinforced door and tried to sense if something was moving on the other side of it.

There was nothing.

It didn’t feel as though something dangerous waited for him inside the treasury. On the contrary, with how fresh the air was and how clean the floorboards were, the treasury looked almost… inviting.

He wasn’t entirely convinced, though.

Sunny lingered for a bit, then commanded one of his shadows to separate itself from his body and slide under the door. It was going to remain very close, so he was willing to risk weakening himself for a bit.

‘How do I even open this thing?’

A moment later, Sunny grimaced and covered his face with a palm.

‘…When did I become this stupid?’

Looking through the eyes of the happy shadow, he saw the armored compartment in its entirety.

It was a large room, with a high ceiling and three heavy chests standing in its center.

The entire back wall of the treasury, though, was missing, letting in a flood of sunlight through the jagged edges of a massive breach.

‘Of course it’s missing!’

The Chain Worm had to have gotten inside somehow, after all. Sunny doubted that the demon could have fit through the door of the treasury, let alone politely lock it behind itself after leaving.

He sighed, then shook his head and decided to attribute this momentary lapse of judgment to the taxing nature of having to endure the pain of being poisoned.

No one was there to witness him making a fool out of himself, anyway!

Regardless, there was no terrifying Nightmare Creature laying in wait on the other side of the reinforced door. Nothing was going to attack him if he entered.

Sunny considered climbing back on top of the hull of the ship and finding a way to enter through the breach in the back wall of the treasury, then simply stepped through the shadows and appeared inside. He was too excited and impatient to waste any more time… not to mention that the more times he spent here, the more chances there were of something going terribly wrong.

If there were really hundreds of coins in one of those chests, though… that would be a trophy to put all other trophies to shame. A find of a lifetime.

Sunny waited for a couple of seconds, letting his eyes adapt to the bright light of the sun, and then studied the three chests standing in the middle of the armored compartment.

All three were open. Two stood empty, but the third…

His eyes widened in shock.

The third chest was long and adamantine, its dark wood reinforced by strips of dull metal. It was large enough to fit an adult man…

And filled to the brim with heavy gold coins. Some spilled out of it and were laying on the floor in a tantalizing pile, showing either the beautiful face of the mysterious charmer or the reverse depicting the ancient ship.

‘Thousands… there are thousands of them!’

Sunny felt his heart skip a bit and swayed slightly.

In front of him was a treasure that would take him all the way to forming a third core, and then some. With this many miraculous coins, Sunny would be able to annihilate the gap between himself and Nephis… maybe even overtake her.

‘This… this can’t be true…’

He instinctively wanted to think that it had been far too easy… but it wasn’t, really. He had almost died while fighting the Mirror Beast, allowed Saint to be injured in a fight against Sailor Dolls, walked through the poisonous darkness of the ancient wreck… if it wasn’t for the Blood Weave, he would have been already dead.

How many people out there could boast about carrying the legacy of a daemon in their veins? For almost anyone else, this trip would have been fatal. Not to mention that very few could have made the series of discoveries and logical conclusions that would lead them here.

So no, it wasn’t too easy to get to where he was currently standing. It wasn’t easy at all. And anyway, Sunny was due for a bit of good luck. Recently, nothing had really gone his way… take this whole Mongrel fiasco, for example. Or everything that had happened in the Crimson Spire.

…The heavy chest stood silently, surrounded by sunlight. The golden coins shined in the bright radiance, inviting him to come and take them.

Sunny gulped. This sight was so beautiful. His eyes gleamed with avarice.

‘Don’t mind if I do…’

Taking several steps forward, he approached the chest.

‘Gold is heavy. How am I going to carry all of this back to the Sanctuary? Damnation! I won’t be able to enter the shadows with all that burden, too. That is a problem.’

He reached for the coins… but then stopped suddenly. His hand hovered just outside the invitingly opened chest.

Something… wasn’t quite right.

Sunny frowned.

‘What is it… huh, maybe a can bury the chest and make several trips… wait, no, what’s wrong here?’

His frown deepened.

There was no danger inside the treasury. Nor was there anything moving outside of it. The terrifying creature that had been slumbering in the cargo hold of the ancient ship was still asleep. There were no Sailor Dolls wandering nearby, too. So what was disturbing him?

‘The… the Chain Worm…’

The Chain Worm had swallowed several coins. He also had a piece of the chest in its stomach, the wood splintered, the strips of metal torn…

Sunny had even thought how lucky he was that the demon decided to feast on the metal reinforcing the chest and bit a chunk out of it, swallowing the coins in the process.

So, if he had torn a piece from the chest… why wasn’t the chest missing a piece?

And what had mortally wounded the Chain Worm, anyway?

Confused, Sunny glanced at the two empty chests. They were perfectly whole, with no parts missing. Then, he looked back at the large, heavy chest in front of him, his hand still hovering a few centimeters away from the pile of gold inside.

The chest had all its corners, too.

…One of them, though, was of a slightly different color. Like a patch of new skin that had grown over a wound, and didn’t quite match all the rest.

Since when were chests capable of healing?

‘What the h…’

Before Sunny could finish the thought, though, the chest seemed to have sensed his hesitation. It suddenly lurched forward, and as massive jagged teeth suddenly appeared from beneath the gold, its heavy lid closed on Sunny’s hand with a sickening sound of breaking bones…